"That's my brave little woman.--Now, bathe your eyes, and stop here till the redness has gone off. I'm going down to write." She kissed Naomi tenderly, and left her, making her way to the drawing-room, where she wrote several letters, one being to Mr Saxby to ask him to come down again for a day or two, as she wanted to ask his advice about an investment. Volume 2, Chapter XI. JOHN MONNICK LOOKS AT HIS TRAPS. It was one of those dark, soft, autumn evenings when the country seems dream-like and delicious. Summer is past, but winter is yet far away; and the year having gone through the light fickleness of spring and the heats of summer, with its changes of cold and passions of storm, has settled down into the mellow maturity, the softened glow, the ripeness of life which indicate its prime. Doctor Scales was not happy in his mind, he was--and he owned it--in love with the imperious beauty Lady Martlett, but he was at odds with himself for loving her. "The absurd part of it is," he said to himself as he lit a cigar and went out into the garden, "that there seems to be no medicine by which a fellow could put himself right.--There," he said after a pause, "I will not think about her, but about Scarlett." He strolled slowly along, finding it intensely dark; but he knew the position of every flower-bed now too well to let his feet stray off the velvet grass, and as he went on, he came round by the open window of the drawing-room, and, looking through the conservatory, stood thinking what a pleasant picture the prettily lighted room formed, with severe Aunt Sophia spectacled and reading, while Naomi was busy over some sketch that she had made during the day. Lady Scarlett was not there; but it did not excite any surprise; and the doctor stood for some minutes thinking, from his post of observation, that Naomi was a very sweet girl, as nice and simple as she was pretty, and that she would make a man who loved her, one of those gentle equable wives who never change. "Very different from Lady Scarlett," he said to himself, as he stood there invisible, but for the glowing end of his cigar. "Ha! I don't like the way in which things are going, a bit." He walked on over the soft mossy grass, with his feet sinking in at every step, and his hands in his pockets, round past the dining-room to where a soft glow shone out from the study window; and on pausing where he could obtain a good view, he stood for some time watching his friend's countenance, as James Scarlett sat back in his chair with the light from the shaded lamp full upon his face.